Special Alexandre Petrov
Andalussian Film Institute, November 10th: 5pm
Master Class and Screenings
Trabajo de PetrovAlexandre Petrov was born in Prehistokie, near Yaroslavl (Russia) in 1957. He enrolled in the School of Fine Arts of Yaroslavl at the age of 12 and in 1976 he was already a part of the VGIK film institute of Moscow as an illustrator, under the direction of Ivan Ivanov-Vano. There, in 1981, he started working on his first animated film.
In 1984 he made The Night in collaboration with Vladimir Petkevich and in 1985 he and Alexei Karaev made Dobro pozhalovat (Welcome). Out of these two films, Petrov would perfect his mastery in the art at the Academy for Screenwriters and Directors alongside the masters of animation Fedor Khitruk, Youri Norstein, and Edward Nazarov. In 1988 he worked in the Armenfilm and Sverdlovsk studios.
His first animated film, Korova (The Cow), in 1989, attracted international attention for his talent and the use of his unique technique of painting oil onto glass illuminated from behind. Since 1992 he has run his own company, Panorama Animation Film Studio. That same year he made Son Smechnovo Tcheloveka (The Dream of a Ridiculous Man) and, in 1997, Rusalka (The Mermaid). In 1999 he created the movie The Old Man and the Sea from the novel of the same name by Ernest Hemmingway in IMAX format (29,000 images on sheets of glass) and won the Oscar for Best Animated Short Film in the year 2000. He recently released his most recent work: Moya lyubov (My Love).
He generally dedicates an elaboration period of several years to each film due to the complexity and meticulous nature of the technique that he uses. As a director, Petrov only works with stories that move him in a special way. He does not judge them, but rather he lets himself be invaded by them, and that which captivates him at any given time is what carries it out. Curiously, in two of his films, he has taken his son as a model, in the short film The Cow, and his father-in-law in The Old Man and the Sea.
Explanation of the technique of animated oil painting:
Alexandre Petrov has made his films by developing a unique animation technique in which he paints oil onto glass, using different panes of glass to create a sense of depth (multi-plane) for those sequences that require it. To go from one image to another, he first draws the silhouette that is somewhat modified from the one he wants to animate. Then he erases the previous shape and constructs the new one. He captures this frame and goes on to the next. With each frame he smudges the paint as the drawings go by on the same medium, the first is always cleaner than the last, and so he usually works on the same image until he gets around eight frames. Then he cleans the glass and builds again a new drawing on which to work out the next frames.
María Navarro Diego
Program director and coordinator for the Special Screening Alexandre Petrov.
Distribución: Coloraina Films.
Petrov jobFascination is perhaps the word that best defines state of mind for those who have had the chance to see the work by this animation genius.
In the productions by this unique artist, literature, painting, and music are all brought together and orchestrated under the baton of movement. With references to Andrei Platonov (The Cow), Dostoievsky (The Dream of a Ridiculous Man) and Hemingway (in his penultimate film, The Old Man and the Sea), Alexandre Petrov immerses us in his paintings to transport us with his fingertips through a unique sensory and emotional experience.
Born in 1957, he began his praiseworthy career in Moscow in 1981. His beginnings toward art set the foundations for an exquisitely constructed visual narration, whose careful planning can be made out in the storyboards.
By using oil paint as a plastic instrument and animation as its narrative vehicle, Petrov constructs images with his very own hands by finger-painting onto backlit glass, which in years past was done on canvas. The paintings resulting from such a thorough process are photographed to take a meticulous and decisive place in the sequence of 24 images necessary to complete a second of screen time.
All these paintings, perfectly orchestrated and executed, are bathed in a realism and expressive lyricism that emphasizes the very nature of oil painting. Its qualities and textures fuse together in motion like in a dream, showing an extremely rich range of nuance in backlight.
Motionless painting is transformed; it flows, winds, and imitates a living reality. Time brings together the pigments and gives them motion, thus allowing for the transmutations that draw out the story.
Petrov is motion made in oil paint; a Michelangelo of the ephemeral, capable of creating and destroying 29,000 paintings on glass over three years, of which only he and the constant eye of the camera can attest to.
All these unique films, shot patiently before disappearing, are the magnificent artistic legacy captured in his short films.
Gonzalo Miralles
Animation Film Critic.
